Hi Doug, thanks very much for the response, i'm glad you got something out of it...
& in regard to "past", i guess all i can say to that really is, yes, the spelling mistake is supposed to
be in there....
'passed' would have been altogether too literal, the effect i was after was something a little more
peripheral and expansive - 'past' also includes 'passed' in its sonic scope.
additionally, the poem is about the way place and memory build experiential conglomerations
whereby older moments of vivid experience intrude into the perhaps more ordinary present. i am
using the word 'past' here as a 'block' signifier, rather than a transparent conveyer of meaning.
i write a lot about art and sound art and at the moment my favourite artists and audio people are
those whose works are both extrememly formal and aware of the stultifying effects of formalism -
so they approach things a little intuitively within the formal perameters they set out, with often
fairly surprising and interesting results. in this way a 'mistake' is a place where new possibilities
can occur - it is the domain of the experimental.
when i was 21 and getting my first poems published about ten years ago in New Zealand journals,
a certain editor sent me back a 'corrected version' of something i'd written. There was an
intriguing 'spelling mistake' in that poem - far more interesting than the hasty one in this one
here - which really opened up the line into three dimensions, conflating 'red' with 'read'. I quite
liked it, but he completely failed to see it, because he was stuck on grammatical correctness.
Which i am too of course, but only when it's appropriate.
so that's a few of the things i was thinking about....
Sally
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